AI godfather Geoff Hinton: "Deep learning is going to be able to do everything"

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition, which challenged teams to build computer vision systems that would recognize 1,000 objects, from animals to landscapes to people. In the first two years, the best teams had failed to reach even 75% accuracy. But in the third, a band of three researchers--a professor and his students--suddenly blew past this ceiling. They won the competition by a staggering 10.8 percentage points. That professor was Geoffrey Hinton, and the technique they used was called deep learning.